My Road To Brooklyn ~ Part I

*Many people have asked why I decided to move from California to New York. And others ask how I was able to make such a big move. Throughout the next couple of days I am going to share my "Road to Brooklyn..." enjoy*


For 29 years of my life I lived in sunny Southern California. I moved about an hour west (toward the beach) from my parent's house when I was 19 to attend college. While attending college in the Los Angeles area, I decided to stay after I graduated. The following six years after I graduated I experienced a serious growth spurt. But not in the physical sense. During that time friends came and went and so did many drama filled situations. And at one point I found myself alone. But at the time, I wasn’t aware that God was setting me up for something bigger and was also answering my prayers.

While I was in college I never felt like I could not trust too many people. So I would always pray that God would remove the people who were not supposed to be in my life. It was a prayer I would pray out of routine, but it was something I sincerely meant. So once I graduated, a few friendships remained but many faded. And as time went on pretty much all my college friendships were gone, with the exception of maybe 2 or 3. Not realizing that my prayer was answered, I would often ask God why he wanted me to be alone, “Lord is this what you created me for? To be lonely, without any friends?”

Then I would pray that God would let me meet new people to create new friendships. And other times I would feel like I just needed to accept the fact that I was going to live my life alone, because this is what God intended for me. So there I was in my mid-twenties without many friends, no boyfriend, a dead-end job, and no life direction. It was also around this time that I started to really dislike my job. I knew from the start that there was really no potential for growth at the company, but I stayed at the job because I couldn’t find anything else and had bills to pay.

As the dislike for my job grew worse I would pray for direction. But I often felt like I would be stuck at that job forever. One day my Mother told me she had a vision of me leaving my job, and she saw the owner of the company applauding me for all my good work. But that didn’t matter to me because I had no idea what I was created to do, I had no passion, and no purpose. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

It was also around this time that the desire to move to New York was stirred up in me. I had no idea where it came from because at the time, I had never even been to New York. Because of this desire, in 2010 my mother and I took a week-long vacation and went to New York City. I really liked being in the city because it was different from what I was accustom to. Once we got back home to California I figured since I visited NYC the desire to move there would go away; and it did for a while. But whenever I imaged my future life, I would always picturing myself living and working in NYC. 

It was like the desire was coming back stronger than ever. And everything around me was all about NYC. People I knew from college started to move there. I started meeting random people that lived there. And since I know there is no such thing as coincidence, I got excited and started to feel like God was preparing me to live in NYC.

But having lived in California my whole life, I had no idea how I would ever make a cross country move. I started to became unsure and would pray, "Lord if this desire to live in NYC is not from you, then please take it away..."